This writing class is about finding another way in.

My friend, poet and essayist, Alison Luterman, has always written her way through these times by listening closely to what’s right in front of her — her neighborhood, her friends and family, the rawness of children growing up, the Vietnamese elders down the street, the Mexican neighbors next door. She writes from her grief and her praise, lifting up the human moments that stitch life together.

For Alison, resistance is about paying attention. It’s about naming what she loves. It’s about the quiet act of bearing witness. It’s praising the very things we cannot bear to lose.

In this 90-minute writing workshop, you will:

• Notice where your deepest care lives — in your family, your community, or your memories.
• Explore how grief and praise live side by side, and how writing them both can give you strength.
• Write from the ground level of your own experience, not from theory or abstraction.
• Get closer to the poems and stories that bear witness to the times we’re living in.

This class is for you if:

• You feel the weight of these days but don’t know how to give it language.
• You are grieving what has been destroyed, and long to write toward what is worth protecting.
• You want your writing to resist despair by naming beauty, tenderness, and humanity.

Writing the Resistance isn’t about ranting or preaching. It’s about dropping below the noise into the heart of our lives — where resistance shows up as love, attention, and devotion.

Come sit with us, and let’s write our way toward what matters most.

Los Vecinos

Teresa, our Mexican neighbor,
climbs our porch steps on arthritic legs,
carrying a plate of fresh tamales,
still warm, wrapped in cloth,
because they’re having a cook-out in their yard
with all the tias and grandbabies,
and we’re included in the golden circle
of familia, through no virtue
of our own, yet here she is again at our door
with a plate of something delicious, or a big plastic bag
filled with nopales from the edible pads
of the giant cactus in their yard
which she has skinned and cubed and boiled
in salted water.

They’re slippery as okra
and tart as lemons and she swears they will cure
a long list of ailments, including
but not limited to cancer, high blood pressure,
diabetes…standing on our porch, leaning
against the railing, she enumerates
the benefits while I smile and nod, “Si, si, gracias…”

My friend who lives in a rich neighborhood
says she’s seen ICE patrolling, looking for gardeners
and maids escaping over the back fences of Marin.

They’re tearing apart families like clumps
of seedlings, uprooting whole delicate
ecosystems, but what they don’t
understand is the mycelian nature
of kinship, how love is a weed
that travels across borders in a bird’s belly
and pops up waving its arms, no matter the law.

Our block resounds with spangled mariachi tunes
all summer long, and I’d be lying if I said
I wasn’t jealous some evenings,
lying awake while parties go on all around us,
because this land is their land, and this devotion
is tough and wild and joyous and Teresa can’t read
the red card that says Know Your Rights
in English and Spanish that I give her, nor understand
how I make a living, but she knows
what to do with the leaves of the guava tree
growing along our driveway, whose leaves
are medicinal in dozens of ways–whose leaves,
like the Bible says, are given for the healing of the nations.

By Alison Luterman